(5´) Life is Elsewhere

Ach. This world is not for us!

Mikhail Lermontov

Thursday, 3 October 2002

Sechenov Medical Academy - Moscow:

Would it be callous to admit that I wasn't sad to leave a Morocco for which I had not once felt what they call "patriotism" or a "sense of belonging"?

I don't know.

But I'm confident that the person who said "tar in my country is better than honey in another country" had a fertile imagination, and had never tasted either tar or honey to make the comparison.

I've been here for almost a month and I have a strong sense that I was created to live in this country. It would be no exaggeration to say that I wished I had been dealt a different hand. Then I might have had parents who were better than the two in Morocco who got rid of me (or I got rid of them, no difference). I was like a bad tooth to them. They chose to ignore it rather than seeing to it before it got worse, which ultimately left them with only one option.

Extraction and flinging it as far away as possible, namely Russia!

When I was accepted to study at the Sechenov Moscow

Medical Institute, I understood deep down that it marked a turning point, restoring Zouhair Belkacem to his old self: full of ambition and an honest desire to do the right thing, providing he was thousands of miles from the surgeon reliving his youth and the lawyer driven by a lust for power.

And Ghalia, of whom no trace had been discovered, as if.

As if the ground had opened and swallowed her up.

*

My temperament as a loner led me to avoid all contact with other Moroccan students, instead of mixing with them and benefiting from their experience in dealing with a different education system and in understanding alien customs and traditions.

I knew that decision was a bad one, but wasn't my number- one aim in leaving Morocco to get away from everyone and everything to do with it?

I preferred therefore to share student accommodation with a Russian called Sergei Kryachkov, who said he came from the Moscow suburbs but grew up in a city in Siberia I had never heard of called Tomsk. He showed me on a map and I learned it was over 2, 000 miles from Moscow.

The guy was so skinny that if you saw him you'd think he had a disease requiring urgent medical intervention before he gave a thought to studying medicine. His fine blond hair was the colour of a wheat field and he wore black spectacles that gave his green eyes and smooth features a cute, childish look. In short, Sergei Kryachkov looked like the Russian Woody Allen!

He was in his first year, that is, he was a full year ahead of me (since the university required foreign students to become proficient in Russian before pursuing their degree subject the following year). I had no problems communicating with him though. On the contrary, mixing Russian and English was of benefit to both of us, especially as he had a passion for something that I believed I had left long behind. Reading.

Even though Sergei's timetable was full of lectures and classes that required laborious preparation and constant revision, I really admired his unbreakable habit of devoting an hour to reading before he went to sleep.

Whenever I looked at his bedside table, I would see a paperback novel, which changed every week, sometimes even twice a week.

Sergei's books made me curious and when I asked him about them he said they were from the university library and had mostly been on the shelves since the time of the now-collapsed USSR in the '70s and '80s.

Old copies, some of which had yellowing pages and were filled with the comments and doodles of previous readers. Yet they bore a strange pleasant smell that made you stick with the book to the last line, taking pleasure in the idea that, before you, it had been in the hands of a beautiful girl in Saint Petersburg or a lonely old man in a forgotten Moscow care home or even a prisoner exiled to the remoteness of Siberia!

I faced but one difficulty: dealing with the Russian language, which I had yet to master. So my roommate advised me to join the university library, telling me enthusiastically that special duallanguage editions, Russian-English, of all the classics of Russian literature were available.

I thought it was a good idea, and as long as my first year was devoted to mastering the language of the locals, I could do no better than literature to improve my level with the help of great Russian authors to pave the way.

That's what I expected to begin with, but life with its customary absurdity chose to plant a landmine by the side of the road.

*

"I wouldn't claim to be an expert in world literature," said Sergei as we entered the university library, "but I'm quite sure that nobody writes like the Russians. You'll see for yourself."

Distracted from what he was saying, I wrapped my woollen scarf round my neck and mumbled, "What I care about right now is preparing to face the savage Moscow winter. I already can't cope with 2°C in October, which you think is mere preparatory child's play. For God's sake, what kind of weather is this?"

Sergei laughed as he commented, "If the Russian cold can get into your bones, I have no doubt that its literature can warm your soul, but." He suddenly cut himself short, in a way that did not match his calm, almost shy, personality. I followed his gaze with my eyes and discovered a young woman near the turnstile into the library.

I did not miss Sergei's signs of anxiety, and I was perturbed that his face had gone red, as if he'd drunk a whole bottle of vodka in one go.

"What's over there?" I asked. My roommate ignored me even though it would have been easy to give a truthful answer.

We moved closer to her and Sergei said hello while, like a scanner, I gave her body the once over from top to bottom. Two long, black-stockinged legs, above them a short red skirt revealing a narrow waist and a white woollen top that failed to conceal the fullness of her breasts. Her long neck she had chosen to cover with a red scarf that matched her skirt.

I took the opportunity provided by her talking to Sergei to observe the motion of her lips and study her features with the meticulousness they deserved.

Passing quickly over her ruddy cheeks, small nose, and fine chin, I lingered over the colour of her hair, which was blond like Sergei's and styled like Princess Diana's. As for her eyes, the only fitting description I could come up with, despite it being a cliché, was beautiful and the colour of the sea.

My final impression was that she was a gymnast or ballerina or even a tennis player, no difference. What mattered was that she did some sport that required rigorous physical exercise and had rewarded her with a fit body capable of driving anyone who saw her out of their mind before leaving her face to deliver the final blow.

She was holding a book like the pocket editions that my friend read. He even pointed at it and said something in Russian that I did not understand, although I noticed he stammered his words.

After giving him an answer, the girl quickly put the book in her bag and left, giving Sergei a polite smile and me a cold, expressionless glance.

I put my hand on the Russian's shoulder and whispered in his ear, "A month more or less and you've already fallen in love with her?"

"You don't understand a thing. She's Olga Kuznetsova, a classmate from high school. The way things turned out, we continued our studies in the same subject at the same faculty."

"And all the years you've known each other you haven't dared tell her your true feelings?"

Sergei kept quiet, trying to hide his embarrassment, so I changed the subject with another whispered question. "You pointed at her book and recited what I think is a passage from it. What was it?"

"'My soul has been spoiled by the world, my imagination is unquiet, my heart insatiate. To me everything is of little moment. I become as easily accustomed to grief as to joy, and my life grows emptier day by day.' It's Grigori Pechorin from Mikhail Lermontov's novel A Hero of Our Time."

The words hit home, describing as they did a suffering that had marked my tortured soul for years. I went up to the librarian, a woman in her fifties, showed her my foreign-student library card, and asked determinedly in English, "A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov, the dual-language edition!"

Busy with a pile of paperwork, she replied calmly, "All the copies are on loan. The last one went to the young woman who just left the library."

"It looks like our time is worse than Grigori Pechorin's, the hero of the novel," Sergei commented, making fun of my disappointment. "We all feel despair and think we're heroes in a time not right for us!"

I didn't grasp what he meant by his obscure words and was only more determined to obtain a copy of the novel. I ran outside, unfazed by his astonished reaction.

The woman was standing in front a large notice board covered in university notices and she focused her attention on one which she read with great interest:

"You almost ate me up with your eyes just now."

Her chilly and uncensored words in impeccable English gave me a shock, but I ignored their implication and quickly redirected the conversation: "I understand from the notice that there will be a chess tournament at some place on 13 October. Excellent. It'll be a great chance to restore my glory on the chessboard after...